Ethiopians vote except Tigrayans in tense general elections, amid conflicts
Ethiopia holds parliamentary and regional elections this Monday that analysts expect Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's party to win in a landslide, despite significant conflicts in parts of the country.
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| Ethiopia's Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed votes during the parliamentary and regional elections at a polling centre in Jimma, Oromia Region, Ethiopia, on 1 June, 2026. @ Reuters |
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Melissa Chemam
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More than 50 million of Ethiopia's 135 million people are registered for the elections, called upon to vote for the 547 members of the House of People's Representatives, the lower house of the Federal Parliament.
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, 49, is confident of his victory. He was appointed in 2018 following mass protests against the long-ruling EPRDF coalition. His newly formed Prosperity Party won 410 out of 484 seats in parliament in elections in 2021.
Prosperity Party (PP) candidates have campaigned on the government's economic record, citing improved food security and economic growth in Africa's second-most populous country that officials project will top 10 percent in 2026, one of the fastest rates on the continent.
"It is obvious that the PP will win these election," an expert working for ACLED on the Horn of Africa, told me, requiring to stay anonymous. "The elections were also much more open in 2021, and even more in 2005, the most democratic polls in the history of Ethiopia so far."
One region excluded, two regions under insurgency
The country is voting with an exception in the northern Tigray region, where the electoral board has cited "unfavourable conditions" following a 2020 to 2022 civil war and continuing political turmoil. More than 750,000 people are still displaced by the war.
"Organising an election remains impossible in Tigray," Muauz Gidey, a researcher at the Tigray Institute of Political Studies, told RFI's correspondent in Addis Ababa, "due to an extremely degraded security context and the collapse of the political system."
Though the peace deal known as Pretoria Agreement ended the civil war in Tigray in 2022, researchers say the conflicts caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, and a move by the main political party there to reassert control over the region’s political administration last month has led Ethiopian officials and analysts to warn of the risk of fresh unrest.
Political dialogue between Addis and Mekele, Tigray's political capital, is also at a standstill. On 8 April, the federal government reappointed General Tadesse Werede as head of the Tigray Interim Administration, angering the TPLF, which then reinstated the pre-war regional parliament, deemed illegitimate by Addis Ababa.
Kinge Hadush Belay, president of the Tigrayan opposition party Salsay Weyane Tigray (Sawet), told RFI that the population of the region is now "held hostage between a party that is fighting for its survival and the federal government, which does not create a climate conducive to elections and dialogue."
Ethiopia also faces insurgencies in the country's two biggest regions, Oromiya and Amhara, linked to grievances by different ethnic groups about alleged marginalisation within Ethiopia's federal system.
In Abiy's native Oromiya, in the south of Ethiopia, fighting between government forces and the Oromo Liberation Army separatist group has killed hundreds of people in the past few years.
In neighbouring Amhara, a militia known as Fano has seized swathes of the countryside since 2023. As a result, voting will not take place in at least eight of Amhara's 138 constituencies.
"Even the Prosparity Party wasn't able to campaign in Amhara", the ACLED expert told me. "Delays are likely to affect multiple regions in Amhara and in the Somali region," they added.
But elections are "just a multiplier of all the crises the country is going through", according to ACLED's expert.
Weak opposition
The Prosperity Party is nevertheless expected to dominate the elections against a fragmented opposition, weakened by internal rivalries.
Ethiopia’s economy is expected to grow by 7.8 percent in 2025-26 and 8.5 in 2026-27, according to the African Development Bank, with Abiy credited for his campaign of economic liberalisation, opening the country up to foreign companies.
But some opposition parties accuse the federal government of undermining them through arrests of their leaders and legal obstacles to their political activities, charges the government denies.
Upon taking office in 2018, Abiy moved to liberalise Ethiopia's tightly controlled economy and freed some journalists, activists and other political prisoners. He even won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for ending hostilities with neighbouring Eritrea.
But his opponents and human rights activists accuse his government of reversing those gains in recent years by detaining other journalists, shutting down civil society groups and overseeing military campaigns marked by atrocities.
The government has denied systematic human rights abuses and said its actions are necessary to protect national security.
General apathy
For all these reasons and a generally difficult economic context, these general elections are generating very little interest among voters. Months of a lackluster campaign let the opposition struggling to make its voice heard.
“People aren’t paying much attention to this vote because, for them, everything is already decided, everything is already calculated. We know the result and nothing will change!” one voter told RFI's correspondent in Addis.
“Politics doesn’t interest me that much", another said. "I could have voted for an opposition candidate who, in my opinion, deserves it, but in the end, I didn’t even bother to register on the lists and get my voter card,” Yohanes added, not hiding his weariness with the political situation in the country.
Two observer missions are deployed in the country, one from the African Union and the other from IGAD, the regional organisation for the Horn of Africa. In total, around one hundred experts are present to ensure the independence of the election.
Results are not expected until 11 June.
